Echoes of Madonna's Erotica on Renaissance
In the past few days I’ve been revisiting Madonna’s old albums. You might not know it but I was a MASSIVE Madonna fan as a tween and teen. I kind of peaced out on Madonna fandom right around the time she made Evita (1996) - the last album of hers that I bought and really liked was Bedtime Stories (1994). But man did I worship her in my pre-adulthood. There’s a photo of me dressing up as Madonna for Halloween before I was 10. At the summer camp I attended for several years as a teenager, I and my bunkmates put on a Vogue sketch in which I played Madonna.
Madonna is still very online at the age of 64, but a lot of the discourse portrays her as pathetic in a way that makes me sad. A lot of that is her own fault I think, because she seems to be fighting against her inevitable aging in an ungraceful way - she’s clearly had a lot of plastic surgery done on her face and probably other areas of her body. And she still seems to crave the type of relevance and cultural clout she once had, but when it’s a 64-year-old doing things 20-somethings do, it inspires pity. What makes me sad is that people under 30 ONLY see the desperate, aging pop star trying to stay relevant. They don’t really understand her larger cultural significance, how impactful a star she was, and how many societal taboos she shattered in her music—from abortion to gay rights/the AIDS epidemic to interracial marriage to female sexual pleasure.
A few days ago, I listened to Madonna’s Erotica album (1992) for the first time in decades, and suddenly it dawned on me that this album is is an important blueprint for the best album of 2022, Beyoncé’s Renaissance. (And in case you’re wondering since my last post on the album: yes, my feelings about it changed sometime in the past 6 months and it truly grew on me and I love it. Still maybe not as much as Lemonade, but it’s pretty close!) I haven’t read or heard any music critic say anything about Madonna’s influence on this album beyond a passing mention to “Vogue” (1990), which of course was the first song to introduce the world to ballroom, a majority Black and brown queer subculture in New York City. Beyoncé is very clearly paying tribute to ballroom, as well as Black queerness in general, on Renaissance. She also released a remix of her single “Break My Soul” that’s a mash-up with “Vogue” and definitely recognizes Madonna as a pioneer in this respect.
But I now think the Erotica album may be just as an important a Madonna predecessor for Renaissance as "Vogue” is. Erotica is a dance album, which unlike Renaissance within Beyoncé’s body of work, was not really a departure for Madonna. Many of her albums, beginning with the self-titled debut Madonna in 1983, were dance-centric at the time. Of course, Renaissance is meant to pay tribute to Black house and disco music more specifically, which is in many ways what has defined what I’ll call the middle part of Beyoncé’s career—brilliantly resurfacing and reinterpreting diverse Black musical styles.
Still, it’s more than the fact that both albums are dance albums. As many critics have pointed out, Renaissance is Beyoncé at her freest in terms of expressing and asserting sexual desire (though I think a lot of people have rightly connected it to her 2013 self-titled album thematically, which is where she first showed herself to be a “grown-ass woman”). Some have gone so far as to suggest Beyoncé actually expresses queer desire on Renaissance, which is a huge stretch for me, wishful thinking really. She’s still firmly ensconced in hetero-desire as far as I can tell - it’s just that there tends to be some slippage when women openly assert sexual desire. Somehow, it still feels transgressive within a society that has historically judged both female desire and queer desire to be “abnormal.” As for Madonna, she’s long flirted with queer desire, beginning with Erotica, and reportedly has had relationships with women. Last year she supposedly “came out” in a cringey TikTok video.
The larger point is that Erotica was truly revolutionary in terms of the explicitness of the themes Madonna addressed. I mean, the title song makes it plain: it’s mostly Madonna speaking over a dance track and inhabiting a dominatrix alter-ego, Dita. This song, the album and her infamous “Sex” book that was released alongside the album shattered boundaries in terms of explicit content and imagery - there was no one else in pop music doing anything like it. The song “Where Life Begins” is very explicitly about the pleasures of receiving oral sex. So when on “Cuff It,” Beyoncé sings “Can I sit on top of you?” I can’t help but think about the fact that Madonna did it 30 years ago. It’s worth mentioning some of the intentions behind these albums as well. Madonna’s activism
Beyoncé
It’s hard for me to imagine, given the dance music foundation and sexually explicit themes and assertions of female desire on both albums, that Beyoncé did not think about Erotica at all during the making of Renaissance. Yet because of the way we have come to see Beyoncé as the most significant Black artist of the current generation, and because she takes such pains to celebrate her Blackness and pay tribute to so many Black artists who came before her, I think some of the other influences get less attention. It’s worth remembering that Madonna pioneered an extremely raunchy, unapologetic female sexuality that still impacts contemporary artists. And despite all the cringey stuff she does these days to try and stay relevant, she’s still and will always be a pop music legend.